How Chief Human Resources Officers can leverage AI to build the people-centric organization of the future

In an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered world, Human Resources (HR) teams have never been more empowered to create better people-centric experiences. HR has expanded from a solely administrative function—managing employee files and filling vacant roles—to a strategic one. Today’s Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) is responsible for building and maintaining company culture and building a workforce that aligns with and can accomplish company goals. They are also trusted with immense amounts of confidential data that must be protected against the risk of cyberattacks.

Unfortunately, many of the administrative tasks HR teams are responsible for have remained highly manual and rely on unstructured data from assets such as resumes, performance evaluations, and employee information. The time and effort required to complete and manage these tasks keeps HR leaders from fulfilling their strategic potential.

The HR organization of the future is automated and AI-powered. Previously time-intensive tasks are completed in a fraction of the time, freeing CHROs to utilize their team on strategic, people-focused initiatives. Data that used to live in siloed point solutions and in paperwork are unified in a secure digital HR hub that helps ensure compliance and confidentiality for every employee.

Let’s explore some of the key challenges AI can help CHROs overcome and the key qualities of a high-quality automated HR solution.

Overcome tool complexity with a centralized HR platform

HR teams are drowning in complex and ineffective technology ecosystems. Employee data is spread across many different applications. Despite the large number of tools teams are being asked to manage, 83% of HR leaders said they don’t have the right HR technology to succeed in the modern era.

A centralized, secure, and intelligent HR platform can unify data from legacy digital financial and HR systems—acting as a complement to existing systems rather than a replacement. Generative AI allows team members to ask questions about the workforce in plain language and get data summarized from many different sources. HR professionals are able to do their jobs efficiently and to the best of their abilities working from a complete set of structured and unstructured employee data in a simplified digital environment.

Automation reduces busywork and frees teams for strategic initiatives

In a recent survey, 73% of HR leaders indicated that the balance of HR work is still more administrative and process focused than strategic. And in a Gartner survey, a majority of HR leaders said that automating administrative tasks and automating HR operations is their highest-priority generative AI use case.

An AI-automated HR platform can reduce the time it takes to complete tasks like managing employee files, resume screening, contract development, and language translation. Removing tactical and time-consuming tasks frees HR team members to focus on strategic, people-focused initiatives that drive employee well-being and organizational growth.

AI extracts unstructured data locked in employee paperwork

HR remains a paperwork-heavy field where a lot of employee information is captured in forms. Those forms are sent via email, uploaded to portals, or submitted to other platforms. All of the data contained in those forms has historically been trapped, requiring additional time and effort to locate and re-record in different places.

Natural Language Processing, an AI technology, easily scans and extracts unstructured data from all submitted paperwork. A rules-based system then organizes that data and unifies it with all other digital data from across the company. This creates complete employee files that can be accessed in a single and highly secure online system, ensuring employee confidentiality and freeing HR employees to focus on more strategic work.

Use AI to keep employee files up to date and compliant

Maintaining complete and up to date employee files is a legal and regulatory requirement for all organizations. It’s also a huge time suck. More than 70% of HR teams say they spend more than a quarter of their average workweek dealing with compliance.

AI can help automate the compliance process, reviewing far more data than a human is capable of in a fraction of the time. Customizable AI workflows review all employee files for completeness, automatically notifying HR and employees if any documents are missing, incomplete, expiring, or expired. The benefits are twofold – compliance increases across the HR organization and teams spend less time maintaining employee files.

How can CHROs start using AI today and build the HR organization of the future?

Technology already plays a key role in the HR function – and with AI increasing the pace of innovation, that role will continue to increase. At this inflection point, CHROs need to be focused on the future and adopt technology that will grow with their organization. A key consideration now and well into the future will be data. AI relies on complete and accurate data to perform up to its potential and the best HR platforms will automate the collection and unification of structured and unstructured data from across the company.

Choose a system that provides functionality like:

• Ability to ingest documents across the HR ecosystem in order to provide a unified document repository and a complete set of HR data.
• Intelligent Document Processing, which can help perform many manual tasks.
• Generative AI, which can do things like ingesting data from thousands of documents in seconds and summarizing content in plain language.
• Workflow automation, which can improve efficiency by automating manual tasks and reducing human error.
• Low-code or no-code functionality, making it easier for non-developers to configure the system to provide high-value output
• Ability to ingest documents from legacy systems in order to sunset those applications and reduce cost.

Learn more about HR solutions at Iron Mountain and how you can optimize your digital future.